Did you know that left-handed people die on average 9 years younger than right-handed people? Surprising, right? More on this later, I promise.

How might surprise affect learning? Intuition tells us that when we are surprised we are more engaged ("Whoa! I'm going to pay attention to that thing that is surprising!"), we are motivated ("What could explain that surprising thing?"), and we are possibly delighted ("Yay! New and interesting things are fun!"). Surprise should jolt us into a meta-cognitive state ("How could that be true?!"). Each of these psychological/emotional/cognitive states has clear intuitive links to learning.

Unexpected events cause an automatic interruption of ongoing mental processes that is followed by an attentional shift and attentional binding to the events, which is often followed by causal and other event analysis processes and by schema revision.

In other words, surprising events cause us to take notice and to search for an explanation that fits the surprising thing into the way we see the world.

Foster and Keane (2018) maintain that surprise is a "process of 'sense-finding' or 'explanation-finding'" that "increases with the explanatory work required to resolve it." That study found that

surprising outcomes (less‐known outcomes) that are more difficult to explain are recalled more accurately than less‐surprising outcomes that require little (known outcomes) or no explanation (normal).

Put simply, if we encounter something surprising, we are motivated to explain it, and the more difficult it is to explain, the more surprising it is and the more memorable it is as a result. All this sounds like educational gold. Present students with surprising things so that they will be intrinsically motivated to discover an explanation for it, thus driving engagement and "schema revision."

Examples of surprising things in different learning domains:

Literature: Shakespeare and Cervantes died within 24 hours of each other: April 22-23, 1616. (wikipedia, wikipedia)

Literature: Shakespeare "plagiarized" a lot of his material. (nytimes)

Physics/Chemistry: The strongest material in the universe might be what cosmologists call "nuclear pasta," which is 10 billion times stronger than steel. (kottke.org)

Global Politics: Some people believe the things Donald Trump writes in his Tweets. (no source)

...and I'm sure that you, dear reader, can come up with much more interesting examples. If you are so inclined, highlight this text and add your ideas to a Hypothesis annotation.

The positive implications are obvious. We can use surprise as a tool for boosting learning. Are there reasons to only do this sparingly, or to do it cautiously?

Let's revisit the surprising fact I offered at the beginning of this piece: Left-handed people die, on average, 9 years sooner than right-handed people. This should strike almost anyone as surprising, since we typically don't associate handedness with such extreme life expectancy differences. It also works against what we commonly understand to be the causes of mortality. It generates the appropriate metacognitive response: Is this really true? What would explain this?

The claim originates in 1991 with a study conducted by Diane Halpern and Stanley Coren, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, "Handedness and Lifespan" and in a more rigorous form by the same authors in Psychological Bulletin. (Coren's previous article on the increased risk of accidents in left-handers was published in the American Journal of Public Health, in 1989.) These studies indeed make the claim that being left-handed correlates with decreased lifespan. The authors speculate that it might have something to do with the design of cars, for example, or knives – in other words, that left-handed people are the victims of products designed for right-handers.

The claim is legitimated by many sources. Besides being published in one of the premier medical science journals on the planet, it was consequently reported by Reuters and then printed by many leading news sources (see for example the NY Times). The statistical analysis was called into questionvery soon after the initial publication, but even decades later it seems that the refutation needs to be broadcast again and again. This indicates that despite the claim being false, it is surprisingly durable. (This motivates a further question: What makes people hold onto false claims and fail to grasp true claims?)

Here's a surprising claim that turns out to be true: Most published research is false. Read that again. The majority of published scientific research can't be replicated. In other words, if you hear about a study – coffee causes cancer, cellphones cause cancer, Google makes you stupid, whatever – there's a betting chance it isn't true. Surprising!

Surprise is a powerful motivator – we should leverage it to boost motivation and engagement.

However, attention is a commodity. Scientific publications are even affected by it – more attention is paid to more sensational, surprising findings, which pushes academic presses to release results that are likely to be false. If we lean too heavily on surprise as a motivator, we can find ourselves contributing to the soup of clickbait, "surprising" facts that are false, and other problematic information being traded. This is a reason that "fake news" is so successful – it is surprising, but also plausible in a way that the tabloids never are.

Ultimately, while surprise is a nice turbo boost to learning, we also need to help students understand that when we create new knowledge, it need not be surprising. Sometimes what we need to do is simply make steady, unremarkable, unsensational progress. As Jessica Love puts it:

The counterintuitive has its place. But our love affair comes at a cost. It leaves little room in the public consciousness for social scientific work that is incremental, for work that shores up and teases apart, for work that complicates, for work on the boundary conditions—those fragile social and mental habitats upon which decisions turn. In other words, it leaves little room for most of social science.

Surprise should always be leveraged as a way to increase self-reflection and critical thinking.

This at the end of a writing conference with one of my twelfth grade students, a thoughtful young man named Sebastian.

"Uh... Yes, OK," I said, caught slightly off guard. Besides the course reading, which is mostly in the form of short stories, poetry, essays, and journalism this semester, I always encourage free choice reading, especially novels. Wasn't he reading? I haven't had much time to keep track of it lately. "Absolutely. That's a great goal."

"Yeah, it's something I've always wanted to do. But I don't know where to start. I've only ever read a couple of books. I read Catcher in the Rye. I liked that book..."

Sebastian paused, briefly looking into the distance as if imagining Holden and his youthful quest for authenticity.

"Maybe when I'm done with high school I will be able to read."

The next day I was talking to a different student, Tiago, an ambitious character who'd proudly brought a book to class earlier in the year. The book was a compilation of "great philosophical ideas" condensed to two page summaries. Tiago's goal was to read and understand this huge list of ideas.

Before class started on that day recently, I asked him which new philosophical idea he was reading about.

"Oh, mister, I don't have time for that."

"Huh...?" I mumbled, once more confused.

"I don't have time to read that kind of thing. I have summative assessments."

"It's the IB," his friend interjected helpfully.

All the students nearby looked up and murmured agreement.

So, there I was, wondering how bright, thoughtful Sebastian can come to the end of high school wanting to read but not feeling as if he has the time; wondering how eager, ambitious Tiago could be thwarted in his quest to grasp the Big Ideas of philosophy by the very school system that purported to give him opportunities to learn.

The book's basic premise is that the standards and assessment movement in US national education has had the effect of producing people who don’t know how to write, and are largely alienated from the learning process by a system that simultaneously holds their hands and prescribes in ever more stringent detail their every intellectual move. We are in thrall to an educational hype machine that continues to miss the point.

The deeper question it raises is: what are the unintended effects of educational principles and strategies we adopt? In other words, how does an educational system shape thought, and are those shapes really what we aim for? He argues that no, the kids don’t know how to write, but that is because they are doing what we told them to do. In a sense, this is a symptom of "success."

So, the presence of disengaged students and anxious teachers is not a new phenomenon, but the context in which I encountered it is interesting. I frequently meet students in the IB Diploma Program who have abandoned passionate self-directed learning in favor of "making the grade." What we say we want – that students are empowered to direct their own learning, and, as such, grow into independent and resourceful members of society – is being undermined by the system we use to shape student thought and action.

This is not the particular fault of the IB and its demands, nor of AP or any other advanced high school coursework. This situation is one that has unfurled incrementally, too slowly and ubiquitously to point to any one cause. We can point to the insidious incentives of grades, to the late-capitalist reality of higher education signaling effects (i.e. if you were graduated from Elite Institution XYZ you must be more valuable as an employee), to standards and accountability movements, to the high stakes testing movement, and more. I fear that this discussion is too much about culprits and not enough about concrete solutions.

What solutions does Warner offer? He leaves us with his renewed focus on teaching writing by connecting writing to purpose beyond the classroom. He advocates for paying teachers more, solving some of the more egregious labor market inequalities that have cropped up, both in K-12 and higher ed. He argues that teaching loads are too large to meaningfully interact with students in a way that gives them freedom and offers them sufficient guidance. He adds his voice to the anti-testing chorus, pointing out, obviously and necessarily, that the more high-stakes testing shapes the system, the more it shapes the students, and not in ways we want. But perhaps the most important piece of advice Warner offers – and also the most oft-repeated in educational theoretical discussions – is that we should see things from the student's perspective.

To take seriously the student perspective is difficult and maybe even revolutionary. It may lead us to uncomfortable truths. Why don't students like school? According to some, it's simply because they value freedom, and school is not a situation in which they can be free. Warner's vision skews to this side of the truth: school can be a tyranny of grades, alienating assignments, and institutional control, even under the very best conditions, under the conditions we design and implement on purpose.

All this brings me back to a remarkable text, The Lives of Animals by JM Coetzee. It is about how humans are so terrible to animals (we instrumentalize them) and why we ought to stop doing that. There’s a powerful excerpt in which a researcher has captured a chimpanzee and is giving it different tasks in order to study how it thinks (and to “humanize” it, to educate it).

First, the scientist shoots the chimp's mom, extracts it from its habitat, puts the chimp inside a cage, ships it off to a lab — you know, standard science stuff. Then the scientist begins devising problems for the chimp to solve: hanging bananas from the top of the cage, and placing crates in the cage, so the chimp has to stack the crates to reach the bananas. The scientist is thinking: how complex can I make these problems? How “smart” is the chimp?

From the chimp's perspective (his name is Sultan), the scientist is a sadist who relentlessly forces him to think in a certain way, to shape his thought toward instrumental reason and away from the abstract, the ethical, the metaphysical.

In his deepest being Sultan is not interested in the banana problem. Only the experimenter’s single-minded regimentation forces him to concentrate on it. The question that truly occupies him, as it occupies the rat and the cat and every other animal trapped in the hell of the laboratory or the zoo, is: Where is home, and how do I get there?

Coetzee’s narration from the perspective of the chimp is devastating and heartbreaking. Read it, if you can, if you have the time and the energy. It reminds me of Sebastian who wants the time and space to read, and Tiago who wants to throw off the yoke of college-readiness and focus on the metaphysical, the ethical, the philosophical. The question that truly occupies these students, as it occupies all students negotiating the pressures of institutional education, is: Who am I, and how do I matter?

This thought, with its fuzzy, uncontainable, uncertain boundaries, its uniqueness, is the thought we must allow to take shape on its own.

In a recent Op-Ed for the NY Times, philosopher Michael P. Lynch notes that when people share material through social media, two things are probably true:

They haven't read the material;

They are sharing an emotional claim – "I'm outraged, and you should be, too!" – rather than a factual or knowledge claim – "X and Y are occurring."

His conclusion is that we misunderstand "fake news" and what happens online because we mistake our emotional state for a knowledge state. We tend to mix up feeling and knowing.

Compare this with a recent study (via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution) entitled "Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom" (link). The study finds that students feel they learn less in an active environment versus a passive (lecture-based) environment, when in fact the opposite is true: students learn more in an active learning environment.

Tyler Cowen's take-away is something like: this is more evidence that student evaluations are bunk and we shouldn't use them to evaluate teachers at all. Doing so only promotes inferior teaching methods. Just so. But the idea I take from this, alongside Lynch's reminder about how online sharing functions, is: there is a measurable difference between how we feel about something and what it actually is, and this difference can either be useful or it can be an obstacle.

Everyone can fall prey to this difference, especially when it comes to effort. Effort is by definition hard to sustain. Not to paint with too broad a brush, but entertainment is so close at hand these days, activities requiring serious effort are that much more difficult to promote as "better." It's becoming more difficult to argue that reading the book is better than watching the movie. (It's always been difficult to make these arguments, granted.) For creative or deep thought, there simply is no straight line from beginning to end. Time and focus are quite simply required, and the feeling we get when we expend time and focused energy on a problem or a project should be some version of discomfort. Learning, like every activity worth doing, should not be easy. By definition it cannot be.

This is not to say that learning and creating and deep thought cannot be simultaneously pleasurable. (For example, one reads about the concept of "flow".) But the discomfort associated with challenge, resistance, and effort are part of what forces our brains and our bodies to adapt to novel situations.

When it comes to learning, students and teachers should know the following:

Learning is difficult and will make you uncomfortable in various ways.

Sustained, active effort is required for the best kinds of learning and creating.

There are fairly well-documented aspects of cognitive performance – such as spacing, interleaving, spatializing memories (the "memory palace"), and so on – that should guide educational practices.

How students and teachers feel about those knowledge claims, well... it doesn't much matter, except insofar as their feelings are obstacles to progress.

]]>Below find examples and suggestions for techniques to help students become stronger critical readers using Hypothesis. Some of the following also function as organizational strategies to support students and teachers in keeping track of the large amount of data being generated by engaged readers.

“Instructions”

Add a Page Note to

]]>http://gclinton.com/scaffolding-annotations/5d779ebdf4a3ad0ce123595dTue, 10 Sep 2019 13:34:25 GMTBelow find examples and suggestions for techniques to help students become stronger critical readers using Hypothesis. Some of the following also function as organizational strategies to support students and teachers in keeping track of the large amount of data being generated by engaged readers.

“Instructions”

Add a Page Note to every document or website you want your students to annotate. Include some scaffolded instructions -- what to look for, basic expectations, maybe even a link to the rubric. Tag the Page Note “instructions,” and also include the name of a unit of study or major concept being investigated.

If you do this consistently, students can use the “instructions” tag to find all the assigned readings quickly and easily.

Teacher Models

Ex. 1 -- Pairing annotations with a “synthesis document”

The “Big 5 Practice document” is a blank table in a shared Google Doc in which students would curate, synthesize, and bring together their main close reading work into a single text box. All the groups can see and edit the synthesized version, or they can use the tags in Hypothesis to look at different groups of observations from inside their Hypothesis dashboard.

Ex. 2 -- Direct Questions

In this case, the teacher simply asks direct questions that students should consider. This is helpful if the teacher has a very specific learning target they don’t want students to miss. Here you can see the tag is “reading prompts” -- another way to differentiate observations from assigned questions.

Ex. 3 -- Stepping Stones

Lead students on a journey from text to text and back again. In this case, the teacher sets up a comparison between an idea from Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe and the text he criticizes, Josef Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Students watch, annotate, and respond, all within Hypothesis.

Then they move to a second text:

This model moves the students through multiple texts, and asks them to make direct hyperlinks between the texts, which reinforces and enriches their schema.

]]>This is a design I worked on to think through the issues specific to using Hypothes.is in an educational setting.]]>http://gclinton.com/design-how-to-represent-changes-in-a-hypothes-is-conversation/5d6e9888f4a3ad0ce1235946Tue, 03 Sep 2019 16:52:45 GMTThis is a design I worked on to think through the issues specific to using Hypothes.is in an educational setting.]]>Photo by Jyotirmoy Gupta / Unsplash

One of my favorite books to grab off the shelf and flip through is George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By. It argues that the foundation of language and thinking is metaphorical, and that once you start to trace the structure of metaphors

One of my favorite books to grab off the shelf and flip through is George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Metaphors We Live By. It argues that the foundation of language and thinking is metaphorical, and that once you start to trace the structure of metaphors you begin to realize how fluid our worldview must necessarily be. It is utterly wonderful to read, in part because the authors catalog all sorts of metaphors built deep into daily, common speech.

I recently read one of our school library's new books: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben. It is a description of trees as if they were sociological beings. The author is a forester in Germany, an amateur but extremely knowledgeable tree scientist. He links all his observations and descriptions to contemporary science and primary research. He'll write things like:

"Do tree societies have second-class citizens just like human societies? It seems they do, though the idea of 'class' doesn't quite fit. It is rather the degree of connection — or maybe even affection — that decides how helpful a tree's colleagues will be."

Or,

"But a pair of true friends is careful right from the outset not to grow overly thick branches in each other's direction. The trees don't want to take anything away from each other, and so they develop sturdy branches only at the outer edges of their crowns, that is to say, only in the direction of 'non-friends.' Such partners are often so tightly connected at the roots that sometimes they even die together."

Another utterly wonderful read.

The texts are both concerned with metaphors — one with how human language is constructed, and one with using metaphors of human behavior to understand tree-being. Wohlleben's controlling metaphor is:

PLANTS ARE PEOPLE

One of the richest metaphors, in my opinion, in Lakoff & Johnson is:

PEOPLE ARE PLANTS

(Related: ORGANIZATIONS ARE PLANTS.)

We tend to think of students in plant terms: they "bloom," they "blossom," they "branch out" and so on. Lakoff catalogs many more examples, and we could think of even more. We think of ourselves in plant terms, as well. Many of us in overseas education have a desire to "put down roots" as opposed to being perpetually peripatetic. Maybe we "cultivate" skills or experiences.

Poking around the Internet, I stumbled on a database of metaphors maintained by the International Computer Science Institute. It appears to be some kind of resource that could, I assume, be used to train computer models of language. But it's also just fascinating to browse. You can add to the database (it's a wiki) if you can parse the very technical structure of the linguistics framework.

Here are a few metaphors I found thought-provoking:

FERVENT ADVOCACY IS INSANITY

MORAL IS STRAIGHT

NATION IS A BUILDING

NATURE IS A STRICT FATHER

BEING IMPOVERISHED IS BEING AT A LOW LOCATION (just next to) BEING IMMORAL IS BEING LOW

It's always comforting to encounter advice to slow down, take it easy, and get back to basics. In Small Teaching, James M. Lang encourages higher ed instructors to take small steps toward making a big impact in class. We don't need to reform our entire approach to curriculum and pedagogy, he argues. Most teachers don't have the time and frankly, wouldn't be interested. What we can do instead is to get clear on a handful of key findings from neuroscience and psychology, and translate those into good investments: relatively low-effort, high-impact tweaks to how we interact with students, how we assess, and how we organize our curriculum. While the book is framed by a discussion of teaching in higher ed, everything is generally applicable across the educational spectrum.

The book is organized into three parts: "Knowledge", "Understanding", and "Inspiration". Each part has three sub-sections, corresponding to a particular concept in the science of how students take in, organize, retain, and use new concepts, skills, or information. Each sub-section ends with a short description of actionable classroom tweaks or interventions that target that particular finding. For example, after describing the concept of interleaving – in which instruction and student practice is shuffled together in a pattern of alternation, rather than chunked into "blocks" – Lang provides a timeline for a series of concepts and suggests ways to go about introducing the strategy into a weekly course schedule.

Some of his suggestions are so utterly, remarkably "small" that they may seem too basic to even mention. During his discussion of the science of memory, Lang notes that spaced review can improve storage and retrieval of memories. One of his "small teaching" interventions is simply to ask students to recall concepts and ideas from the previous class period. While this struck me as strange – isn't everyone doing this already? – as a secondary grades teacher or administrator, we should keep in mind the intended audience. University professors are not always trained as instructors; they are content experts. They learn from doing and are often burdened with the frustrations of trial and error in the classroom. Something as simple as "ask them what they already know about this" or "ask them to try to remember what happened last class" goes a long way, and speaks to the overall message of the book: you don't have to do much to tap into the benefits of cognitive psychological findings. Sometimes all it takes is a good question, framed in the right way, posed at the right time.

Here are a few conclusions that will either be useful new knowledge or at least useful reminders of what's effective:

Knowledge: "One of our first and more important tasks as teachers is to help students develop a rich body of knowledge in our content areas – without doing so, we handicap considerably their ability to engage in cognitive activities like thinking and evaluating and creating." (p. 15) In other words, "higher-order thinking" just isn't possible without a large foundation in "lower-level" information.

Retrieving: Quizzes and tests are learning opportunities, not only forms of assessment. Students who are quizzed often and get rapid feedback will be able to remember more information for a longer period of time. And also: extra time to study and re-read has no real impact on testing outcomes. Re-reading doesn't help. Testing for learning does. (p. 24-27)

Retrieving: Reading checks. "Include retrieval type questions at the end of every page or section's worth of material, and ensure that students can't get to the next section until they take a brief quiz." (p. 35) I've written in the past about tools like Edpuzzle – this is small teaching in a nutshell: low-effort, high-reward.

Retrieving: Use exit-ticket-style checks to close class – this is a form of retrieval practice. (p.39)

Interleaving: "...all major exams in your course should be cumulative. Research on learning supports this implication." (p. 74) "More generally, every major assignment should require students to draw – at least a little bit – on information or concepts or skills they have learning in previous units." (p. 75)

Practicing: "Make Time for In-Class Practice" and "Space it Out: ...five 10-minute practice sessions spaced out throughout the course will work more effectively than a single 50-minute practice session. This makes practicing according to the small teaching paradigm ideal for learning: the multiple, brief sesions a small teaching approach would recommend are exactly what should benefit your students most fully." (p. 133-4)

None of the science is original. Lang packages it neatly and simply. He draws heavily on two well-known and also excellent titles in this space: Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology by Michelle D. Miller, and Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learningby Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel. In turn, much of this is founded on work by popular science communicators like Daniel Willingham, psychology professor at UVa, who has built a successful career not only advancing the science of learning but helping teachers understand it and implement it. Lang is a professor of English, which is to say, he focuses primarily on the second task: communicating with teachers and doing what I believe is the noble work of improving pedagogy one teacher, one classroom, one lesson at a time.

Highly recommended for coaches and administrators, as well as instructors in middle school, high school, or higher ed. The science is applicable in elementary school, but younger grades have specialized processes and techniques; the framework of this book will almost certainly not be as interesting to elementary teachers.

]]>Below is a Zotero collection of sources I'm using to write a paper about teaching war narratives with video games alongside traditional novels. I'm going to annotate the entries with Hypothes.is on the Public channel.

(If you want to see the highlights, refrain from regrouping the collection. If you

]]>http://gclinton.com/annotated-bibliography-video-games-as-literature/5cd5b30af4a3ad0ce1235665Fri, 31 May 2019 18:11:28 GMTBelow is a Zotero collection of sources I'm using to write a paper about teaching war narratives with video games alongside traditional novels. I'm going to annotate the entries with Hypothes.is on the Public channel.

(If you want to see the highlights, refrain from regrouping the collection. If you regroup the collection, you can refresh the page to reset the highlights.)

]]>An index is an organized catalog of concepts that allows efficient navigation of a text. It also allows a reader to see trends, motifs, or patterns, even without actually reading the text. Creating an index of a book while you're reading is a great way to close read for literary]]>http://gclinton.com/teaching-students-to-close-read-by-creating-indexes/5cf12fcbf4a3ad0ce12356d7Fri, 31 May 2019 14:13:39 GMTAn index is an organized catalog of concepts that allows efficient navigation of a text. It also allows a reader to see trends, motifs, or patterns, even without actually reading the text. Creating an index of a book while you're reading is a great way to close read for literary commentary, but it is also a way to synthesize information, no matter what the text type.

My own experience with indexing falls into two categories:

Indexes I've created that have been published

Indexes I've created to promote my own research

I created the index for Krin Gabbard's Better Get It In Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus. Before tackling this project I had very little working knowledge of Mingus. I understand music and have a relatively deep knowledge of contemporary, classical and baroque music, and a solid foundation in music theory. But I've never been a jazz scholar nor a jazz musician. Nonetheless, careful reading and indexing does not require expertise in the specific domain. It does require some knowledge of the general field, but not expert level knowledge.

What I learned about indexing from these projects is that careful reading doesn't require you to be an expert. It also taught me how to move slowly and carefully, and to keep track of everything I observed. You throw your observations at the wall and see what sticks.

The example of an index I created to promote my own research comes from J.G. Ballard's High Rise, which featured in my dissertation on architectures of safety. The index looks like this:

An index I created at the front of J.G. Ballard's novel High Rise.

It is very messy. But by creating a map of motifs and references, I was able to see patterns and associations. This led me to create coherent and evidence-based thesis statements. Again, I threw things at the wall and then pieced the results together in the way that made the most sense to me. Here is a set of notes I wrote for students on the concepts of "prison" and "zoo" in the novel, just a brief thinking "essay" (a trial, an attempt) using quotations recorded in my index. This pushed me toward a "thesis statement."

I share these examples with students so they can create their own indexes while they read, so that they are motivated by the possibilities of indexes, and so that they aren't so intimidated about what to record. Just record anything that happens more than once, that speaks out, that conforms to some expectation or that undermines some expectation, or that fits into a pre-determined "literary" category: metaphor, setting, characterization, etc. The hard thinking work comes at the end, and by that point, if your index is rich enough, the paper will practically write itself.

]]>

I'm working on some new teacher training workshops around classroom annotation using hypothes.is, an open web/PDF/epub annotation tool.

Here is a document that I'm using for teacher training. It's full of links that anyone can feel free to follow and explore. I recommend using the Google Docs

I'm working on some new teacher training workshops around classroom annotation using hypothes.is, an open web/PDF/epub annotation tool.

Here is a document that I'm using for teacher training. It's full of links that anyone can feel free to follow and explore. I recommend using the Google Docs "Outline" feature to navigate the different sections.

It's a work in progress — I expect to be updating it as time allows and I get feedback on what's useful. I imagine also building out the "domain-specific" guides so teachers can focus on what's important to their particular field.

I'm particularly happy that I can put Vialogues to good use by annotating the Hypothes.is webinars, making them easier to navigate and digest, but also making them interactive for viewers after the fact.

But as Matuschak points out, if your goal is to promote learning, non-fictional books are mostly under-designed. In other words, they rely on a model of cognition that isn't

]]>http://gclinton.com/are-books-badly-designed/5cdac8ebf4a3ad0ce1235690Tue, 14 May 2019 14:30:47 GMTAndy Matuschak asks an intriguing question, mostly because the answer doesn't require any thinking: of course not! Books are the best!

But as Matuschak points out, if your goal is to promote learning, non-fictional books are mostly under-designed. In other words, they rely on a model of cognition that isn't true: "transmissionism", or, the notion that understanding can be directly "transmitted" from speaker to listener or from text to reader. In fact, when we learn something new, it is almost always because of something meta-cognitive: we attach the new idea to a web of ideas we already have, we relate the new idea to questions or gaps in our knowledge, we test ourselves ("Do I understand this? What am I missing here, and how can I figure out where my gaps are?") and we try the new idea in novel contexts. Our brains are not bank accounts.

Ditto for lectures. To understand lectures or books, we have to engage in a variety of metacognitive activities. Where Matuschak complains that books and lectures "aren't pulling their weight," I would simply say: their "failure" as well-designed learning tools underscores the real goal of education, which is to help students develop the metacognitive skills and habits that will allow them to access materials and master them, in whatever form those materials appear.

]]>In 2007, my colleague (Russell Daw) and I at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India lamented that there were no visualizations of assessment data generated by the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program (DP). The IB DP generates a lot of detailed assessment results, but provide very little analysis]]>http://gclinton.com/ib-score-reports/5cd48a61f4a3ad0ce1235651Tue, 14 May 2019 13:51:11 GMTIn 2007, my colleague (Russell Daw) and I at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India lamented that there were no visualizations of assessment data generated by the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program (DP). The IB DP generates a lot of detailed assessment results, but provide very little analysis for schools to use to inform teaching and learning. So we worked to start a service for IB schools that would allow them to do just that. The result was IB Score Reports, which my co-founding partner has cultivated and grown to provide analysis to 120+ schools a year, around the world.

The goal was to create static data reports that could be printed or displayed on screen, through which administrators and teachers could easily discern clear trends. We paid a lot of attention to the theories and attitudes of Edward Tufte, who stresses visual and intellectual clarity – above all else – when designing data displays. Within the boundaries of clarity, we also wanted to maximize information density. Below are a few of the results.

Using wikis in classrooms has had a small but reasonable presence in secondary and higher education for the past decade or so. There is some research to support the use of wikis as collaborative educational tools. (Here is a short annotated bibliography of research I

]]>http://gclinton.com/the-macbeth-wiki/5cd1870bf4a3ad0ce1235523Thu, 09 May 2019 16:32:47 GMTSomething Wiki This Way Comes

Using wikis in classrooms has had a small but reasonable presence in secondary and higher education for the past decade or so. There is some research to support the use of wikis as collaborative educational tools. (Here is a short annotated bibliography of research I found useful and inspiring.)

Some benefits I see derived from the wiki project in practice:

The wiki format supports a few key meta-cognitive goals: understanding how collaboration can foster learning, understanding how individual contributions can lead to collective learning benefits, and understanding how to see ideas from other people's perspectives.

The wiki format can also help overcome some common obstacles to effective group work: members of my group are not working hard, what other people contribute doesn't help me directly, I can't work at my own pace, and so on.

And in the case of textual analysis, the wiki format underscores the potential for annotation as a core reading and analytical skill.

The Project Goals

The goal was to use Shakespeare's Macbeth to teach students about inter/intra/extra-textuality; annotation as an analytical skill; literary concepts like tone, mood, word choice, setting, characterization, and theme; and to reinforce the meta-cognitive ideas listed above. I wanted students to move from concepts to application of those concepts. I wanted to give students multiple opportunities to work at their own pace, recognize the benefits of their work to others in the learning community, and to make their own decisions about how the text "ought" to be read and understood. I wanted to leave plenty of room for creativity and risk-taking.

Teaching Concepts

I used the mini-lesson model. Teach a short, focused 10-15 minute lesson on a specific skill. Provide an example, some practice, and a chance to apply the new skill. For a short demonstration of this, go here.

Enrichment and Practice

Asynchronous online discussion can enable quieter students to join a conversation and can enable students who process more slowly to participate more fully. Discussion forum software is ubiquitous, but tools like EdLabs Vialogues allow students to discuss and annotate video. For a short demo, go here.

The Wiki

Once students have a good grasp of basic concepts, the elements of annotation, and have done an initial reading/viewing of Macbeth, it's time to dive into the wiki.

Each team grabs the full text of a scene or scenes from the play from the MIT edition and pasted it onto their page of the wiki. (The only limitation I impose at the beginning is that initially the pages must be organized chronologically, to make cruising through the text easy for a visitor.)

Then, the challenge for each team is to use hyperlinks, images, videos, or their own creative responses to enrich the text with definitions, resonances, and interpretations. I encourage them to link within the text – to other instances of a phenomenon, to other ideas or related scenes – and to sources outside the text – dictionaries, artwork, other stories or plays they know or discover, adaptations of the play, and so on.

Draft for annotated Macbeth – Act I, scene 1Draft of character analysis, with embedded Mindomo mindmap.Draft of page referring to "paradox", including links to popular Netflix film The Cloverfield Paradox, illustrating how the concept moves beyond the play, but also how a similar ominous and ethically problematic situation can arise from a paradoxical foundation.

Finally, once the web of associations and interpretations has taken shape, they present the other teams with a "wiki hunt" designed to lead the others through the main discursive threads that they have established. Each student comments on and adds new annotations to the web.

We end with a discussion and reflection on the wiki and how it has shaped both their understanding of this particular text as well as how the experience has altered their attitude toward collaborative learning and annotation.

Lisabeth's social annotation of Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style shows the potential for wiki work in the classroom to not only engage students in textual analysis and critical thinking, but to resonate on a political level. Students in her writing class found ways, via the public, social wiki space, to question the solid, authoritative nature of Strunk and White's vision of academic language. The defined digital space was important since, as Lisabeth notes, "in digital space these annotations can become a transformative public act as the text being annotated takes a backseat to the collective backchannel" (233).

Interestingly, this description of the birth of a community-generated annotated bibliography called GlossaTechnologia is both relevant to the use of wikis to create authentic knowledge webs, and it is also a cautionary tale that raises questions about the longevity of such projects. GlossaTechnologia was to become the academic hub of annotated knowledge on media, technology, and society, broadly speaking. The goal was to show how "wikis can be used to effectively harness the collective intelligence of a group of scholars to extend the knowledge base of a specific topic of interest..." (217).

Yet the site no longer exists. Archive.org has snapshots of the site from 2010 to 2013. And while some valiant efforts were made to keep submissions flowing, it clearly "failed" in some way. The questions this short lifespan raises in my mind include:

Are (humanities) scholars inherently unlikely to collaborate over the long term? Does the "democratic" structure of the site – anyone can contribute anything – lead to a devaluing and ultimate abandonment of that kind of project? For example, a collaborative project like Somatosphere is humming along, precisely because it takes what is strong and good about academic publishing (consistency and quality, plus exposure and prestige) and it makes the barrier to entry slightly lower than traditional journals. But Somatosphere maintains an editorial board and active editors who determine what is published and what isn't. It is not democratic in the way of a wiki. This article inspired a number of questions about the nature and use of wikis for long-term academic collaboration that I don't think have yet been answered.

What is the best way to engage with a text? Reading on paper? Reading on a screen? Listening to an audio recording of the text? Does it even make a difference? Let:

Rp = Reading on paper

Rs = Reading on screen

L = Listening to audio

Studies suggest that {Rp > Rs} for retention and understanding. One recent meta-analysis (Delgado et al, 2018) suggested that Rp yields consistently better comprehension results in a variety of conditions. For instance, where there are time constraints to the reading task, Rp is better. When reading informational or mixed info/narrative texts, Rp is better. (Interestingly, Rp when reading narrative texts held no significant advantage over Rs.) When Rs, many students think they are more competent than they are (they are "overconfident")(e.g. Lauterman & Ackerman, 2104; Porat, Erez, et al, 2018). The results tell a consistent story of the slight but real advantage of Rp for learning.

The science of L is interesting in part because some people seem really worried about it. Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham apparently "has been asked this question a lot": Is listening to an audio book "cheating"? Willingham's simple answer is: no, L is pretty much the same as R in most cases, although you might get different and crucial information (tone, pace, etc.) from an audio performance of a text that you aren't able to decipher from the printed words.

I offer two brief claims about L in a learning context:

If L replaces Rp/Rs for textual analysis tasks, it seems clear that L will be inferior. The analogy is this: imagine an audio recording of a comic book. Images in comic books are laid out in a way that encourages the eyes to wander or travel back and forth, making connections and re-iterating prior panels. Similarly, in textual analysis, you don't simply want multiple readings of the text, you want to establish structural qualities of a text spatially. I think this would be done more efficiently by annotating the printed text. Comprehension is different than analysis. So in a literature course where the goal is to understand the structural qualities of the text, {Rp > L}.

L encourages multi-tasking, and therefore begins to resemble Rs insofar as it encourages people to be overconfident and to "read" in distracting situations like while they are doing chores or driving. Nora Caplan-Bricker has an interesting take on the rise of audio books: that their convenience is wonderful, except that it also contributes to a larger trend toward erasing the difference between work and leisure, since we can now learn and read "for pleasure" even as we are accomplishing mindless tasks that a laboring life requires, like commuting to work. We can always be productive, which is a sort of problem. But even more, she notes, the audio book phenomenon tends to colonize "every small task—walking to the grocery store, browsing the aisles—that once created space for thinking about nothing." Habitual audio-book listeners (and smart phone users in general) have less time to let their minds wander and be bored, which is at the root of creativity.[^1]

Notes

[^1]: (And, if you go in for Heidegger, then boredom is at the root of self-consciousness itself. Digital distractions literally erode the sense of the self. See (Heidegger, 1983/2001), and I would say just the chapters on boredom, but really, see the entire text.)